I write on fiscal and economic policy issues at all levels of government. Areas of particular interest for me include tax policy, entitlements and public employee compensation. In addition to Forbes, I contribute periodically to National Review Online, City Journal and the New York Daily News. Previously, I was a commercial real estate finance analyst at Wells Fargo. I hold a Bachelor's Degree from Harvard College.

DC's Key Development Failure Isn't Downtown, It's Cleveland Park

The Kennedy-Warren is an 11-story apartment building along Connecticut Avenue in Woodley Park, just south of Cleveland Park. While there is immense demand for this sort of building stock in the area, local zoning rules prevent much more of it from being built. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Matt Yglesias has a piece in Slate today, calling for the abolition of D.C.’s height limit. And while I think the piece is correct, it’s also a little bit of a failure of emphasis:

[U]nlike in the Bay Area or Boston, one of the key limits to population and employment growth in the nation’s capital was set by the U.S. Congress. It’s time to get smart and bring skyscrapers to Washington and prosperity to America.

Relaxing the height limit would lead to more density in downtown D.C. and would be good for job and economic growth in Washington. But as I wrote yesterday, D.C.’s main dysfunctions in development policy aren’t created by the Height Act and will persist if it’s repealed.

Despite being generally subject to a 130-foot building height limit, downtown Washington is actually one of the country’s densest office districts. The best measure of density is what’s called a floor-area ratio (“FAR”): for every square foot of lot area, it tells you how many square feet of building area are you allowed to build.

Commercial districts in Washington’s office core are generally zoned for an FAR of 10 or 12. FARs in midtown Manhattan are higher, but not by as much as you would think—they top out at 15, though 17 is allowed with the construction of a public plaza.

A combination of a low height limit and pretty high FAR allowances has led to D.C.’s unusual downtown built environment: because you have an FAR of 12 and buildings can generally only be 12 stories, nearly every office building is shaped like a cube, designed to spread 12 stories of building area across the entire lot. Some of the locals seem to think this is charming, but really it’s just boring: Downtown Washington looks like a suburban office park with all the buildings inexplicably crammed together.

Don’t get me wrong: Downtown D.C. should be denser than it is. (So should Midtown Manhattan, as the Bloomberg administration realizes.) But Congress’ relaxation of the height limit needs to be matched by a local decision to allow higher FARs, or otherwise you’ll just get the same amount of building area combined with more variable building heights. Since Darrell Issa’s and Vince Gray’s plans are being touted as making it possible to have “sleeker” buildings—i.e., buildings that don’t take up the entire lot area—I worry very much that this reform will have little actual impact on density.

And the most underutilized neighborhoods in Washington could get a lot denser without even coming close to federal limits. I’m talking about desirable residential neighborhoods not far from downtown, where local zoning rules prevent the construction of the mid-rise multifamily buildings that the market demands. While D.C. could use more density downtown, it desperately needs more density in Cleveland Park, Adams Morgan and Capitol Hill—and it’s not Congress that prevents that from happening.

Cleveland Park, like the adjacent neighborhoods on Connecticut Avenue, is an example of a place where dense development was once allowed. There are quite a few condo and apartment buildings around eight stories tall in this area. But eventually, the locals decided the neighborhood had been “built out,” and got zoning rules and overlays that effectively prevent new dense development in the area. Now, development along Connecticut Avenue in Cleveland Park is limited to heights of 40 feet and an FAR of 2. Limits on the side streets are tighter.

The result is a neighborhood of low-rise multifamily and extremely expensive single-family homes within walking distance of a subway station and 10 minutes’ ride to the White House. “Preservationists” even got a strip mall in the core of Cleveland Park designated as a historic landmark in order to prevent another tall or even mid-rise building from going up. It’s an insane misallocation of resources.

D.C. hasn’t made this mistake everywhere. Friendship Heights, a neighborhood along Wisconsin Avenue bordering Maryland, has seen lots of dense development over the last 20 years. But while there is demand for such development all along Wisconsin and Connecticut Avenues in Northwest D.C., this is the only area where it’s now allowed en masse.

You can see the pent-up demand for homes and office space in upper Northwest in the form of Friendship Village, the area right across the D.C.-Maryland border from Friendship Heights. Friendship Village is a cluster of high-rise buildings, with over 4,000 residents in just 34 acres, making it the densest Census-designated place in the entire country. Literally in the first place along Wisconsin Avenue where you’re allowed to build very tall buildings, there is a large cluster of them.

If allowed, Wisconsin Avenue or Connecticut Avenue could develop into a high-rise corridor like Wilshire Boulevard. But a more modest approach is possible without Congressional action. Even consistently allowing the construction of 90-foot high buildings, in compliance with the existing Height Act, would lead to a massive increase in density and in the affordability of these neighborhoods.

The problem is that incumbent homeowners do not view affordability as a feature—they understand that their home values are inflated because of rules that limit the construction of new residences, and they fight hard for restrictions. Washington’s main planning problem is garden-variety NIMBYism that blocks new development—and that can’t be fixed just by repealing the Height Act.

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